For those interested in monitoring the progress of WordPress.com, Matt has posted the January statistics for WordPress.

Here are the statistics Matt has provided:

• 372,519 blogs were created.
• 393,836 new users joined.
• 4,592,097 file uploads.
• 2,710 gigabytes of new files.
• 553 terabytes of content transferred from our data centers.
• 8,771,891 comments.
• 6,528,657 logins.
• 1,073,421,738 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 945,105,050 on self-hosted blogs (2,018,526,788 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
• 1,373,108 active blogs and 18,768,022 active posts where “active” means they got a human visitor.
• 1,295,531,829 words.

The progress is pretty amazing and is definitely well deserved.

I think for quite awhile now the self-hosted version of WordPress has been considered by most to be the dominant blogging platform, but up until recently it was purely speculation.

Last Friday, Royal Pingdom did some research and published the top blogging platforms based upon the Technorati Top 100 list.  As you’d expect, WordPress took first place with 27 of the Top 100 blogs (5 more were hosted on WordPress.com).   Of the self-hosted blogs, Movable Type is in second place with 12 blogs.

For your reference, here are the 27 WordPress blogs (links are included on the original post):

• Perez Hilton
• Problogger
• Chris Brogan
• Zen Habits
• Copyblogger
• Think Progress
• VentureBeat
• SlashFilm
• Global Voices Online
• The Caucus Blog – NYTimes
• Bits Blog – NYTimes
• Freakonomics – NYTimes
• Pajamas Media
• Just Jared
• Smitten Kitchen
• Hot Air
• Neatorama
• TechCrunch
• Smashing Magazine
• Washington Wire – WSJ
• Michelle Malkin
• Daily Blog Tips
• Yanko Design
• Mashable
• Roy Tanck’s weblog
• CrunchGear
• Delicious:days

It is nice to see the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and New York Times (NY Times) both listed here.  It would be interesting if this study is done every year to see trends.   I would imagine WordPress will be over 50% of the Technorati Top 100 list within a few years as some of those blogs switch away from Typepad, move their WordPress.com blog to self-hosted, etc.

WordPress.com is a wonderful and free way for people to begin blogging, but it is only natural for a blogger to eventually “outgrow” it and make the move to a self-hosted WordPress blog. Eventually the draw of being able to monetize your blog, combined with the lure of WordPress themes and WordPress plugins can be to much!

For those making the switch, it can be a period of adjustment as the blogger transitions from having everything done for them to having to do everything themselves. Michael Martine has written a great post walking people through making the move from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. If you are still on WordPress.com, I recommend you click over to check it out!